Compulsory Emergency First Aid Education (State-funded Secondary Schools) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 10:01 am on 20 November 2015.

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Photo of Alex Cunningham Alex Cunningham Shadow Minister (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 10:01, 20 November 2015

I congratulate my hon. Friend Teresa Pearce on securing the time for this debate. I would like to make a relatively brief contribution in support of the Bill.

I was a personal first aider, and I believe I still carry some of the skills with me today. I joined St John Ambulance—not for first aid skills, but because we used to go to the motor racing every other week! I remember now how important acquiring those skills was, and I have carried them through my life. Media stories down the years have shown how young people have saved lives just by having a little bit of knowledge. We know that boy scouts, girl guides, Boys’ Brigade members and all manner of young people have, with training, been able to accomplish that. So we could be saving so many more lives if we gave more young people the necessary skills.

In February 2015, a report on PSHE and sex and relationships education by the Education Committee, of which I was a member, recommended that PSHE should be made a statutory subject, but that schools should retain a little flexibility over what is taught as part of it. With a little encouragement, first aid training and CPR could be included. This Bill does exactly that. It provides for emergency first aid education to be a compulsory part of the national curriculum at key stages 3 and 4. It also provides for academies, which do not have to follow the national curriculum, to be required to teach EFAE at those key stages. To impart those skills, it does not take half an hour a week for three years; it takes an hour a week for about three or four weeks.

We have already heard that current survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK are extremely low.